ダルムシュタットの聖母

Holbein began this in Basel around 1526, and the timing matters. The man kneeling on the left is Jakob Meyer, the former mayor, and Basel was at that moment tipping toward the Reformation, which would soon strip its churches of exactly this kind of image. Meyer was a stubborn Catholic, and commissioning a Virgin who spreads her cloak to shelter his whole family was, in that town at that year, a small act of defiance. Holbein came back to it after a spell in England and kept adjusting the family. He added the first wife, long dead by then, and changed the daughter Anna's loose hair into a braided plait to show she was now betrothed. So the group kneeling under the Madonna's cloak is partly the living household and partly the remembered dead, gathered at different times into one prayer.